New extruder 3D prints tasty treats using chocolate

If you’ve never felt at home with a piping bag in your hands this chocolate extruder will come to your rescue. It can replace the plastic extruder head on your 3D printer (RepRap, Makerbot, most 3-axis CNC machines, etc.), letting you turn your digital creations into decadent reality.

The head uses a progressive cavity pump to feed the chocolate from a reservoir through the printing nozzle. It’s important to keep the chocolate warm or it will set up so when [Tomi Salo] designed the print head he included a heat shroud through which warm air can be circulated. He uses a shoe dryer to source the hot hair which is patched into the heat shroud with a length of tubing.

This extruder can be 3D printed but be careful what material you use. [Tomi] mentions that PLA is ‘sort of food-safe’ but ABS is not. We wonder if the design could be altered for milling out of aluminum or stainless? At any rate, if you’re going to give it a try you might find [Tomi’s] advice on working with chocolate useful.

By making loving chocolate a gender specific quality it trivializes. Is the lack of a chocolate based technological curriculum really a reason a generation of women are not looking to become technologists? If someone likes chocolate does that make them a woman? It might sound trivial, but having years of being told that you should be a particular way, which you might not actually be adds up in a destructive way. It’s okay to like chocolate no matter who you are. It’s not as okay to let someone define you by liking chocolate, it is dismissive.

It would be fair to say that this might be a good project to introduce the concept of 3d printing and all the associated concepts and skills to learn.

There are probably thermal properties that white chocolate is being used, but call me when it does butterscotch.

Actually, from what I read, he did not make chocolate a gender specific quality. Implying that women enjoy chocolate in no way excludes men or any other gender definition from enjoying it. Furthermore, he was not implying that women are not interested in technology because chocolate has not been involved. His joke suggested women would become more interested in technology because of a new application of it, where previous applications have failed to spark their interests. And finally, his intention was not to reduce an entire gender to nothing more than crazed chocolate acolytes. He was merely providing humor drawing upon a popular, even if not entirely accurate, caricature of a gender. And even if it is a stereotype, it’s just as much a stereotype as the comment bellow about “fat hackers” or your assumption that he is bringing about the downfall of respect of women.

“His joke suggested women would become more interested in technology because of a new application of it, where previous applications have failed to spark their interests.”

That’s exactly my point, women aren’t any less interested in tech than men and drawing on an overused stereotype is annoying if it’s in your face all the time.

I’m a woman and I’m here obviously but at the same time I’m constantly talking about 3d printing with everyone and the response is always

“Wait……woah, awesome!”

So I see no reason why women have to be pandered to in any special way. Like I said before, if you have to deal with this crap everyday, it get’s annoying and becomes damaging.

There is nothing about technology that makes in intrinsically more interesting to men, nor is there anything about men or women that make them intrinsically more or less interested in things like that.